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Thursday, November 3, 2016

Pay as you Share

Announced and rapidly withdrawn, Admiral's proposed collaboration
with Facebook was supposed to give drivers a discount on their car
insurance premiums if their Facebook posts indicated the right kind of
personality. According to some reports, the idea was that people who
were reckless with punctuation (too many exclamation marks, not enough
full stops) might also be reckless in their driving habits.

The
punctuation example is probably a red herring. The analysis of
personality will undoubtedly be based on much richer aspects than mere punctuation: Facebook
is capable of much more sophisticated analysis, as well as selling data to other organizations for the same
purpose.

For example, a Korean study in 2013 found that Facebook
activities had predictive power in distinguishing depressed and
nondepressed individuals. However, Facebook may not wish to draw too
much public attention to such capabilities. (There are some important ethical issues in the use of algorithms to predict mental health issues, for example in recruitment screening, discussed at length by Cathy O'Neil.)

Meanwhile, insurance companies will wish to use any information and insight they can get their hands on, to try and calculate risk more accurately. People may consent to sharing their data if they feel they will benefit personally, or if they are unaware of the possible data uses and implications, but that could just result in discrimination against the people who refuse to share their data. So privacy campaigners may not be reassured by the fact that this particular collaboration has been withdrawn.